freshclam command not found

Introduction

When you run more command in linux terminal / console, you get the following error message

freshclam: command not found

or when using sudo you get the following error message

sudo: freshclam: command not found

Solutions to freshclam: command not found

How To Fix freshclam: command not found in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux / Raspbian

In Ubuntu freshclam is provided by clamav-freshclam package.

clamav-freshclam is:

Clam AntiVirus is an anti-virus toolkit for Unix. The main purpose of this software is the integration with mail servers (attachment scanning). The package provides a flexible and scalable multi-threaded daemon in the clamav-daemon package, a command-line scanner in the clamav package, and a tool for automatic updating via the Internet in the clamav-freshclam package. The programs are based on libclamav, which can be used by other software.

This package contains the freshclam program and scripts to automate virus database updating. It relies on an Internet connection, but can be run in a variety of ways to compensate for intermittent connections.

To fix this problem, we can install more using the command below.

sudo apt-get -y install clamav-freshclam

This command might take some time to finish depending on your machine internet connection.

You can also use apt command to install clamav-freshclam.

sudo apt -y install clamav-freshclam

Or if you have aptitude installed you can use the following command.

sudo aptitude install clamav-freshclam

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to fix freshclam command not found error in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux or Raspbian distribution.